Whitney E. Laemmli

My current book manuscript, Measured Movements, is a history of how and why human bodily movement became a key subject of scientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century. Central to this story is “Labanotation,” a tool for recording movement on paper devised in the 1920s by the German choreographer Rudolf Laban. Motivated by an engagement with the work of physiologists, biologists, and neurologists, Laban was convinced that movement was the most important influence on the human organism and sought to employ notation to manage its effects. The book follows Labanotation—and the scientific ideas about human physiological response accompanied it—from its origins in the ferment of Weimar culture to its role in the Nazi state to its eventual life in the factories, hospitals, and corporate boardrooms of postwar Britain and the United States. There, it was used as part of programs to excite exhausted assembly line workers, identify and treat people with mental illnesses, screen white-collar job applicants, and re-make ideas about racial difference. By the 1980s, movement notation had gone “digital”: incorporated into a variety of computerized systems for assessing and replicating human movement. To many of these systems’ developers, Labanotation was simply a useful tool for gathering data. Their decision to deploy it, however, embedded in these new technologies assumptions about movement and its meaning first advanced nearly a century earlier.

Laban's Weimar-era efforts might initially seem worlds away from the mid-century corporation or the contemporary robotics lab. My research, however, illuminates the ties—both intellectual and material—that bound these disparate sites together. In doing so, the book provides a new and newly synthetic account of human movement and its meaning—for scientists, for artists, for patients, for citizens—across the twentieth century.